Suitcase for a Fortnight

Frank Borman and James Lovell had put in long
hours getting ready to spend two weeks in space. Working directly with the
Gemini IV [277] pilots and talking with the crew of Gemini V,
Borman and Lovell learned much about what to take with them and how to prepare
themselves physically and psychologically. They already knew the spacecraft
systems, but they needed to figure out how to live in such confined quarters for
so long and still perform useful work. As successful as the preceding missions
had been, they still wondered if six extra days could be safely added to the
flight. Edward White and James McDivitt had been fatigued; Cooper and Conrad
tired and bored. Both crews stressed the impossibility of sleeping alternately.
Borman and Lovell resolved to sleep and work together.

The astronauts and mission planners had learned another lesson from Gemini
IV and V. Prescribing tasks for assigned times during a flight was
useless. So Borman and Lovell would take off with what was, in essence, a flight
plan outline. Experiments and other tasks would be carried out only when the
flight controllers and crew could fit the job to the opportunity. The only
prescheduled tasks fell between launch and stationkeeping, the first four hours
of a 330-hour mission.

Another innovation that the crew welcomed was adjusting the
sleep-eat-work-relax cycle to their more normal, Earthbound habits. Borman and
Lovell had two work periods each day, coinciding with morning and afternoon in
the United States Central Standard Time zone. This schedule also fitted the
specialized activities of the three flight controller shifts - to execute the
flight plan, to analyze systems performance and the supply of consumables, and
to keep up with what had been done and plan the next segment of activities.35

Stowage of food and gear was a special problem on a two-week flight.
Unfinished meals and food wrappers could quickly clutter up the spacecraft, as
Cooper and Conrad had learned in the eight day mission. Extra storage space in
the small cabin had to be found before the 14-day trip. GPO Deputy Manager
Kenneth Kleinknecht went with Borman and Lovell to St. Louis, where Spacecraft 7
was going through its test phases, to help them hunt for more space. The search
for an extra garbage dump was successful: waste paper from their meals could go
behind Borman's seat for the first seven days and behind Lovell's for the next
seven. After working out procedures, the crew practiced stowing for launch,
orbit, and reentry, until they were sure they knew where to put every scrap of
paper.36

Tailoring flight and stowage plans for a 14-day mission was important, but
even more significant was a newly tailored space suit to make Gemini VII more
livable. In early June 1965, McDonnell started a test program to see if
astronauts could ride almost suitless in space. Gordon Cooper and Elliot See,
wearing standard Air Force flight suits (with medical monitoring plugs, helmets
wired for Gemini communications [278] fittings, and oxygen masks connected to
emergency bottles), flew in the altitude (vacuum) chamber in St. Louis to
simulated heights of 36,000 meters. Both astronauts were elated over the
results, but McDonnell personnel were uneasy - in actual flight, the cabin
temperature might go too high. At an MSC-McDonnell management meeting the next
month, McDonnell was asked to study another possibility. James V. Correale of
the Crew Systems Division had suggested using a lightweight pressure garment
similar in operation to a G3C intravehicular suit. Although this soft suit would
not allow pilots to complete a mission if the cabin lost oxygen pressure, it
would provide them enough margin of safety to get to a recovery area.

Test results at McDonnell showed that the spacecraft environmental system
actually operated more efficiently with suits off, but NASA and McDonnell
engineers did not like the idea of the crew being so vulnerable. The best way to
extinguish a fire in space, for example, was by cabin depressurization, which
was out of the question if the men were suitless. And they needed protection if
they had to use the ejection seats. Therefore, NASA officials snapped quickly at
Correale's idea for a lightweight suit. This decision - in August 1965 - was too
late to benefit the crew of Gemini V, but there was enough time to get
the suit ready for Gemini VII.

To produce a more comfortable suit, the David Clark Company removed as much
corsetry as possible from the 10.7-kilogram (23 1/2- pound) Gemini pressure
suit. The suit was designed to be removed during flight without requiring too
much energy or space. A soft cloth hood - which used zippers, as opposed to a
neck ring, for fastening to the torso portion - replaced the fiber glass shell
helmet. The contractor, working with MSC's Crew Systems Division, managed to cut
suit weight by a third, but the 7.3-kilogram (16-pound) suit was still somewhat
heavy. In evaluation and training sessions, however, Borman and Lovell found the
new garment handy. The soft hood could be zipped open, and the complete suit
could be removed and laid on the side of the seats, without having to be stowed
away.

If the spacecraft systems were performing properly, the crew would take the
suits off after the second day in space. The garments would then be worn only
for such critical phases of the mission as rendezvous, reentry, and landing. Use
of the lightweight suit, designated G5C, was approved in August; by November,
qualification was completed.37

Gemini VII carried more experiments than any other flight in the program.
Because it was the last long-duration mission, its medical experiments were
particularly important in assessing man's capabilities for the lunar landing
program. Of 20 experiments, eight were medical, a higher ratio than in any other
Gemini flight (see Appendix D).38

[279] Two of the medical experiments - calcium balance study and inflight
sleep analysis - were better suited to a clinic than to a small spacecraft cabin
and were viewed with something less than enthusiasm by the crew. Even the name
of the "Inflight Electroencephalogram" (EEG) experiment made the astronauts a
little nervous. Although it was merely a study of sleeping habits in Gemini, the
EEG was normally used to diagnose subtle disturbances such as incipient epilepsy
and brain tumors. But some specialists believed brain wave recording could offer
more information, and the astronauts were understandably wary of how the results
might be interpreted. Changing the name to "Inflight Sleep Analysis" solved only
half their problem. Since normal hair growth would dislodge the scalp sensors
after 48 hours, the information had to be gathered at the worst possible time
the first night, when most people have difficulty sleeping in a new environment,
anyway.39
Borman and Lovell also turned a jaundiced eye on the calcium balance study. It
was a nuisance because they had to keep a complete record of body intake and
wastes for 9 days before the flight, 14 days during it, and 4 days afterward.
Before and after the mission, a nutritionist from the National Institutes of
Health limited the items they could eat and drink and weighed out their meals in
grams. Almost a month of this regimen did not appeal to the crew.40

The only other medical experiment making its space flight debut was
"Bioassays of Body Fluids."*
Its purpose was to study the effect of space flight on body fluid chemistries
that might be affected by physical and mental stresses. The experimenters hoped
to draw some conclusions about the physiological costs of space flight by
analysis of urine samples.41

In categories other than medical - scientific, technological, and defense -
only three experiments were being flown for the first time. The other nine were
repeated from Gemini IV and V. Two of the new experiments were
technological: an in-flight laser transmitter to be aimed at a laser beacon at
the White Sands Test Facility, New Mexico, to establish optical communications
from space; and landmark contrast measurements of selected areas around the
world (primarily coastlines), which might be useful to Apollo for guidance and
navigation. The third was a Defense experiment to determine the value of star
occultation measurements for spacecraft navigation.42

The Gemini VII/VI-A decision made Borman's and Lovell's flight more than an
endurance test. It changed the amount of fuel they could spend for experiments
and stationkeeping with the booster and forced modifications to turn their
spacecraft into a target vehicle. [280] Over an early-November weekend, target
acquisition and orientation lights, a radar transponder, a spiral antenna, and a
voltage booster were installed on Spacecraft 7.43

1 This experiment had been part of the Gemini VI
mission until the flight was canceled on 25 October 1965.